Rocks, The by Peter Nichols Page B

first-class railway carriage of long ago, but he believed the car’s center of gravity was too high, capsizable, and it made him nervous on corners. He felt the same way about Fergus, and his massive, cheerful confidence. But his son-in-law was looking after Aegina undeniably well—in addition to what she was now making from her shop in Covent Garden—and Gerald was no longer anxious that she wouldn’t be provided for. “He’s amusing and he makes me feel safe,” Aegina had said of Fergus before they married. Gerald had not made his daughter feel safe, he had come to realize, a little bitterly. On the contrary, he knew she felt increasingly responsible for him in his impecunious fastness atop a hill in Mallorca, with a dwindling subsistence income, no provision for her beyond the dubious potential of his moldering property’s value, and the uncertainty of his own old age and inevitably advancing decrepitude. Fergus’s scheme was irresistible to Gerald as a father. Didn’t mean he had to like it, however.
    The Marítimo was a concrete two-story building at the head of the port. The restaurant sat on the upper level, above the road. From the terrace, diners could look over the breakwater at the sea.
    Gerald was embraced by the proprietor, a square-shaped man, pale skinned, with areas of white fuzz below his jaw that he had missed with his razor. Gerald handed him the two bags full of lemons, which the man received with solemn appreciation.
    “¡Gerald, viejo amigo!”
he said warmly.
“¿Cómo estás? Demasiado tiempo, hombre.”
He was about Gerald’s age, but looked older and unwell. He moved with difficulty.
    “Bien, Rafael. Y tu?”
    Rafael Soler shrugged and emitted a series of fatalistic grunts.
“El hígado. El reumatismo. ¿Qué se puede hacer?”
He shook hands with Fergus and François, whom he had met before in Gerald’s company and therefore accorded a fulsome courtesy.
    Rafael’s pretty, dark-eyed teenage granddaughter, Rafaela, followed them out onto the terrace as her father sat them at his best table, under the awning, overlooking the port, asking them if the location was agreeable.
    “Estupendo,”
said François.
    “Posseeblay sangria,
por favor
?” said Fergus, grinning at the girl.
    “Sí,”
said Rafaela, promptly turning back into the bar.
    Rafael remained beside Gerald’s chair and put a hand on Gerald’s shoulder, as if to support himself, as they exchanged recent news. Fergus’s Spanish was a rudimentary holiday boilerplate, acquired over the last four years, but he caught a few words about boats and fish, couched in tones of fatalistic disappointment. Rafael gazed out at the port, wheezing and shaking his head. Here it comes, thought Fergus, the workingman’s inexorable disgruntlement with the improvement of his lot. This one, for instance, bloated from lack of exercise and overeating, whose father no doubt worked eighteen hours a day and dropped from disease. François was nodding in commiseration while Gerald politely translated for Fergus as Rafael told them of the small size and scarcity of the fish everywhere in the Mediterranean, the reduction of the local fishing fleet, their berths increasingly taken over by yachts that never left port.
    “Jolly sad, isn’t it,” said Fergus, sympathetically.
    “Homer called it the ‘fish-infested’ sea,” said Gerald. “No longer.”
    Rafael recommended the gazpacho, wished them
“Buen provecho,”
and shuffled off.
    “Ah, finally we have a little breeze,” said François.
    The salt- and moisture-laden air shimmered, refracting sunlight. Gerald looked out at the sea as if through a filmy membrane and saw himself in a little white boat beating into Cala Marsopa for the first time, rounding the old breakwater, coming alongside the quay below the old Bar Marítimo, when he knew nothing of this place and had no intention of staying beyond a change of wind.
    “It’s still an infested sea,” said Fergus.
    François looked at